


If You Shall Live with Me a Long Time

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 03:13:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5568670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the Potter's, after Sirius ran away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Shall Live with Me a Long Time

**Author's Note:**

> My submission for the RS Games 2015.
> 
> Title from Sophie Solow's "Disguise", as follows:
> 
>   _And if you shall live with me a long time,_  
>  _I shall dress you in white satin._  
>  _I shall weave pearls in your hair._  
>  _You will wear them like stars in your hair._  
>  _And many bracelets on your arm will jingle,_  
>  _When you move, when you sway._  
>  _You will walk with a green peacock on either side, ___  
>  _And be as lovely as they._  
>  _You will make a tinkling of little crystal bells,_  
>  _And be mad with the moon. . ._

It was there, hiding beneath an impossibly soft pillow, two of his best friends by his side, waiting for the end, that Sirius Black heard him arrive.

“Is this summer finally over?”

His voice, thick was exhaustion, somewhat eased the wave of anxiety building in him.

Remus. Moony. His friend.

“I didn’t get much information in the letter,” Remus said. “Were the parents a fright?”

From beneath his feathery safety net, Sirius let himself laugh. He heard James stand and pull Remus aside, and he could only imagine what the vague call for the current Emergency Marauder Council read. He decided that he would take the pillow off soon and make it all right again, but he didn’t. Not immediately, at least. He listened to the muffled whispers of his friends, and he knew that they were talking about him. What else was there to talk about? He heard James and Peter move back to their spots beside him, and Remus sit down on the bed, resting his hand on Sirius’ back only for a moment.

Sirius sat up, holding onto the pillow like a little girl confessing a secret to her friends at a sleepover. “I’m alright, really.” And there was Remus’ hand again, light and warm on his shoulder blade like the sun seeping through a window in late afternoon. “It was always going to happen.”

―

That night, the Marauders camped out in the Potters’ sprawling backyard. With an enchanted tent pitched beside Mister Potter’s lemon tree, the four friends sat together for hours; through games of Exploding Snap, shared conspiracies for their final year at Hogwarts, and a few rather offensive, yet ultimately harmless jinxes, they managed to almost distract Sirius from the fact that he was in no way the heir of the Noble and Most Ancient House Black. To Sirius, the fortune and the infamy weren’t what he was all that shocked by―rather, it was that he no longer had parents, nor by the standards of those parents, a _brother_. By the flicker of a low-burning candle, a shivering soft orange light added to by the charmed lanterns floating just above the ground, there was no reason to think about that. Not when Peter had claimed to be able to beat each and every one of his friends at a great round of Wizard’s Chess.

The boys played well into the earliest hours of the morning, before James poorly concealed a yawn with a cough, and Remus soon followed. Sirius took pity on the boys, who were clearly only staying awake for him.

“Well, I am just beat. We can pick this up in the morning,” he said. A grin found its way to his face before he added, “Let me work up my energy to kick poor Pete’s arse.”

Peter yawned halfway through what was shaping up to be a hardly clever retort about one Walburga Black, and the boys quickly dispersed from their seats inside of the circle of lanterns to their respective cots.

―

Sirius waited for a long while―for his friends to stop shifting, for their breathing to slow, for the world to steady out―before he pulled himself up and slipped outside of the tent. He sat on a soft bed of moss underneath the lemon tree. The sky was so very clear that night, stars littered across the dark like gobstones; Sirius was unfamiliar with all of their shapes and stories. Warm winds traveled through Sirius’ hair like the softest of fingers. Along with the breeze flapping at the tent’s opening came Remus.

Although he had listened closely, Sirius could not be faulted for assuming that he was asleep.

Remus breathed in the same way that he walked, soft, even cautious. Sometimes it seemed that he was making up for the one night each month that he could not control how he moved, or how he panted. Sirius was often astounded by how lightly Remus stepped while he, on the other hand, felt all too present in his body. A knot of Mister Potter’s lemon tree pressing against his back, a beetle crawling up his leg―Sirius was anything but numb, and it was impossible not to notice these things.

Remus rounded the tree, toeing Sirius’ arm― _scoot_ ―before settling beside him. He was holding his wand in his right hand, “Lumos.”

Immediately, Sirius blocked his eyes from the light. “Don’t,” he said, “I want to see the stars.”

Hardly a moment passed before―”Nox.”

Sirius uncovered his eyes and looked over at his friend, who was looking back at him with a sheen in his eye that was almost unrecognizable. Concern.

“Last time I checked I was a werewolf, not a star.” Remus smiled ever so slightly, “Funny how things change.”

Sirius’ gaze trailed back to the sky. “Yeah,” he began slowly, “Yesterday I was a Black, today I’m a God damned black sheep. Hilarious.”

A feather-light touch on Sirius’ arm alerted him that Remus was still refusing to let the subject go.

“Sirius…” he started softly, “it’s okay to admit being at least a little bit upset about it.”

Sirius’ disbelief soon gave way to manic laughter. “It, Moony? I’ve been disowned by my family―” he was nearly shouting now. ”Hardly my fucking family anyway―” He was cut off by Remus quietly warning him that he’ll wake the others. Sirius sighed and began to speak more quietly. “Hardly fucking anything.”

Remus was moving his thumb back and forth on Sirius’ wrist, and it brought the boy back to all of the instances where he had started to learn that touching and being touched was not obscene in the way that he thought it was. The first decade of Sirius’ life was not tender and the very few memories he had of physical contact with his parents were not what he later discovered to be the normal, loving sort. Personal space was important in Grimmauld Place―stay out of the way when Mother and Father are near, tuck yourself away. Witnessing mothers kissing their sons goodbye on the train platform for the first, seeing sixth year couples holding hands in the corridor, Sirius had been terrified.

For the beginning weeks of his first year, Sirius has been unusually jarred every time a hand had landed on his shoulder. He would have earned an unfortunate reputation as an easily frightened boy, thus making him the target of far too many pranks, were it not for an awkward, brief, yet altogether informative talk with James when mid-October came around.

Sometime in their third year, Remus had taken to placing soft touches on Sirius’ body―he did it to everyone, Remus was a feeling person, but Sirius soon became starved for the feeling of a fleeting touch to his shoulder, his back, his arms, there only for it’s gone forever, never to be recreated in the exact same way.

If Sirius hadn’t been deprived of affection for so long, maybe he wouldn’t have felt like such a freak when Remus touched him, but the damage was done; he lived for those touches. And there he was, beneath the stars and the lemon tree the morning after everything fell apart with Remus stroking his hand. Sirius wanted to cry.

“I don’t know _any_ of these constellations.” Through the silence, Sirius heard Remus laugh.

“Six years of astronomy lessons have really taught you nothing? Here,” he said, and crawled away from the tree to lay on his back, Sirius following suit, “there’s Hercules. He was a Greek hero, a lot of these are Greek blokes.”

“Didn’t the Greeks always bugger each other?”

Remus looked outright shocked, “What?”

“No, no, I read it in a book. They had this system where blokes just went around getting off with each other.”

The index finger Remus had been resting on the back of Sirius’ hand drifted higher up his arm, and he laughed lightly before answering. “I know what you’re talking about, but that’s not how it worked.”

Sirius adopted a sly grin. “So we’ve been reading the same books?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, mine was a bit _naughty_. I expected more from you, Moony.” Sirius looked down from the dark sky at Remus again, spotting a dark flush in the bright light of the waning gibbous.

Sirius was struck by two things―Remus was healing from the full, no doubt in pain, and he really wanted to kiss him. His mouth was slightly open, breathing in the thick July air; Sirius wanted to breathe that same air, to pull it from his mouth and give the air from his own lungs back to him, he wanted to share every last breath of air that he had with Remus. He wanted to tell him all of these things and he wanted to stay underneath the lemon tree forever.

“Sirius? Are you even listening?”

“Hm?” Sirius came back to reality quickly, while Remus’ thoughts returned to the sky. “Sorry, lost myself there. I don’t see any of what you’re explaining.”

“This explains why you don’t know a thing about astronomy.”

Throughout Remus’ lesson on stars, Sirius drifted in and out. It became clear to Remus that this was happening, but he kept going on for quite a while, if only just to keep a steady stream of noise in both of their ears.

―

Remus’ thumb stroked up and down Sirius’ wrist, and slipped down further to his fingers, stilling when he reached the nail. “Varnish?” he asked.

Sirius jolted from his trance before answering quietly. “Yeah.”

“I hadn’t noticed before.”

“’S just black.” Sirius paused before adding, “He didn’t like it very much.”

Remus sat up to get a better look at him. “Your father?”

“Don’t…call him that. He isn’t, not anymore.” Sirius’ voice was strangled, he was trying to fight back what he was about to say. “Haven’t got parents anymore, haven’t got a brother, haven’t got a family.”

“You tosser, you really think that?” Remus barked, sharp and cruel. “Like the Potters aren’t already your parents? Like James isn’t already your brother, like Peter isn’t your brother, like _I’m_ ―”

Sirius’ jaw lay slack and each time he blinked it felt sharper and sharper as Remus redirected himself and continued.

“You have a family. It’s us, all of us.”

A sharp intake of breath had Sirius toppling over the edge, sitting up to eye level with Remus but doing everything to avoid meeting his eyes. “Moony…” He looked anywhere, from the hand resting on his own to a fallen lemon to Remus’ jaw.

As he lifted the hand not entangled with Remus’, he lost all willpower previously keeping him from doing the unthinkable. In a blur, Sirius leaned forward, placed his hand on the jaw he was so transfixed on, and kissed Remus Lupin.

It was horrifying and shaky, and Sirius forgot, briefly, how to kiss someone. But what was even more horrifying was that Remus was kissing him back.

It was there, hiding beneath Mister Potter’s lemon tree on a bed of moss, the first light of dawn reaching up to break the solidity of the moon and stars, his best friend on his lips and in his arms, that Sirius Black felt that things were going to work out.


End file.
